Homing by Jon Day

Author:Jon Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Published: 2019-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Wondering how she had managed to reach her destination over the steep terrain, circumventing numerous obstacles, and that question, said Austerlitz, a question which still exercises my mind today when I see a pigeon in flight, is one that, against all reason, seems to me connected with the way Gerald finally lost his life.

When Gerald goes up to Cambridge, Austerlitz and he continue to see each other regularly until Gerald, obsessed with the idea of flight, buys a small plane, and is killed when he crashes it into the Savoy Alps.

In Sebald’s writing, home became a refuge, both physically and psychologically, but he also recognised that it was a concept that could just as easily be used to exclude people – the alien, the unfamiliar, and the foreign – as to comfort them. His great achievement was to evoke with and through the texture of his prose the Unheimliche Heimat – the ‘strange homeland’ – of post-war Germany he knew as a child, without ever quite confronting it directly. In a lecture he gave near the end of his life, he said that Germany now felt unreal to him, ‘like an endless déjà vu’, and that the only real home that remained for him ‘was on the page’. Birds provided another kind of continuity: in The Rings of Saturn, a book in which another nameless narrator walks the flat Suffolk landscape in a kind of psychic daze, Sebald described watching swallows fly during the summer evenings of his childhood, when he ‘would imagine that the world was held together by the courses they flew through the air’.

He was killed in a car crash in 2001. According to his American editor, who accompanied him on a reading tour just before he died, the last book he read, on a plane flying over the Atlantic, was a study of homing pigeons. After his death, a cutting from the New York Times about pigeons in war was found inserted into the American edition of Austerlitz, from which he read on that final journey.

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